On the heels of the men of learning went the men of fashion, eager to learn and copy the new manners of a society whose moral teacher was Machiavelli, and whose patterns of splendour were the courts of Florence and Ferrara, and to learn the trick of verse that in the hands of Petrarch and his followers had fashioned the sonnet and other new lyric forms.

This could not be without its influence on the manners of the nation, and the scholars who had been the first to show the way were the first to deplore the pell-mell assimilation of Italian manners and vices, which was the unintended result of the inroad on insularity which had already begun.
They saw the danger ahead, and they laboured to meet it as it came.
Ascham in his _Schoolmaster_ railed against the translation of Italian books, and the corrupt manners of living and false ideas which they seemed to him to breed.

The Italianate Englishman became the chief part of the stock-in-trade of the satirists and moralists of the day.

Stubbs, a Puritan chronicler, whose book _The Anatomy of Abuses_ is a valuable aid to the study of Tudor social history, and Harrison, whose description of England prefaces Holinshed's Chronicles, both deal in detail with the Italian menace, and condemn in good set terms the costliness in dress and the looseness in morals which they laid to its charge.

Indeed, the effect on England was profound, and it lasted for more than two generations.